1. Technical Field
The present invention relates generally to management of a resource and more particularly to management of costs incurred from usage of the resource.
2. Related Art
In recent years, a trend of introducing new on-line software applications to assist in different tasks has expanded extensively. In spite of an intent of these applications to improve employee productivity, it often turns out that work relating to these applications shifts from one group of employees to another group, which is part of a shift from administrative specialists to distributed administration. With employees facing an ever increasing number of applications to handle, a need to learn and use so many applications adversely affects some employees' productivity in their main job. There is a trend of de-centralizing tasks from being performed by specialists who assist the other employees to being performed by the employees themselves, and the trade-off relating to this trend is buried so deep in the current way of conducting business that it is barely noticeable, thus dragging a change in one direction without any balance of the impact on overall corporate performance. Although there are apparent cost savings when viewed from the point of view of one organization, these apparent cost savings are in actuality no more than cost shifts.
Accordingly, there is a need to improve employer productivity in conjunction with software application work projects.